Emergent semantics refers to a set of principles and techniques analyzing the evolution of decentralized semantic structures in large scale distributed information systems. Emergent semantics approaches model the semantics of a distributed system as an ensemble of relationships between syntactic structures.

They consider both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities dependent on the proper interpretation of the symbols. This is a complex systems perspective on the problem of dealing with semantics.